Short message service (SMS) messaging is a popular messaging platform that, despite evolving little over the years, continues to be offered by many wireless network providers and is utilized by a significant number of wireless devices. One example of the lack of evolution can be seen in the encoding schemes enforced by wireless network providers, which, for the most part, continue to allow only a limited number of characters to be included in each SMS message (e.g., 7-bit American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) encoding that limits an SMS message to one hundred and forty (140) characters). Such enforcement can be attributed to a variety of factors, e.g., an intent to increase the number of SMS messages that are required to send lengthier SMS messages that exceed the enforced per-SMS message character limit, which can significantly drive up revenue for the wireless network provider.
Text input advancements, among other things, have increased the average length of text-based messages that are transmitted between wireless devices. Voice dictation, for example, provided by Siri® on Apple's® iPhone®, enables users to dictate lengthy messages that would otherwise be condensed if they were manually entered, for example, via Text on 9 Keys (T9®) as used on early generation wireless devices for text input. As a result, the average SMS message (e.g., an SMS message with four hundred (400) characters) needs to be segmented into multiple SMS messages and transmitted/delivered as separate SMS messages (referred to herein as “message blocks”). Unfortunately, transmitting separate message blocks can result in a variety of problems, including delivering messages out of order, and spanning individual words across two different messages, which can degrade user experience.
In an attempt to cure the aforementioned problems, in some cases, concatenation information is transmitted along with the separate message blocks and can assist the wireless network provider and/or destination wireless device to properly handle the multiple message blocks upon delivery. For example, the concatenation information can be used to properly order the message blocks, and, in some cases, can be used to merge the message blocks so that they appear as a single SMS message on the destination wireless device. Unfortunately, this concatenation information can be stripped away or corrupted during transmission of the multi-part SMS message, especially when the transmission spans two different wireless network providers or two different wireless technologies. Consequently, multi-part SMS messages can cause readability issues in many cases as there is a large divide of wireless device users between wireless network providers.